darklyndsea

I've been watching The Mentalist lately, so here, meta:

The Mentalist is one of those classic stories with no possible good ending, or at least not much of a possibility of one.  Of course, seeing how it's on TV, I'm sure the producers won't ever let it have the terrible ending that it should have, but the only logical endings are bad.

Possibilities:
Red John kills Jane (not likely at all, since he seems to like the games he plays with Jane)
Somebody other than Jane kills Red John.  Jane commits suicide.
Jane kills Red John, then either kills himself or continues with the CBI

• nobody finds out--again, not likely, judging by Jane's personality.
• Jane gets arrested & goes to prison
• Jane gets arrested, but gets off somehow (self-defense, technicality, people covering for him); possibly a happy ending, but probably not if they cover for him
• somebody in law enforcement shoots Jane because he's acting crazy, just killed a guy, and won't put down the knife; or because Jane forces it
• one of Red John's people kills Jane
• Red John kills him as he kills Red John

What really gets me about this show is that, even during the filler episodes, you can see Jane working towards his goal.  It seems like every episode he's testing and/or tempting the team, nudging them into a state of mind where they won't stop him from killing Red John.  And Lisbon and Cho, at least, know that it's all going to end badly (Rigsby and Van Pelt, maybe, maybe not), are expecting it to end badly (didn't Lisbon say, straight-out, that she thought that one day Jane would go too far and she'd be out of a job?), but they still go along with it.  (it amuses me horribly how Cho almost always says a very firm no to Jane's schemes and then the very next scene shows him carrying them out)

This probably sounds like the most obvious advice ever, but you'd be surprised: the best way to get better at writing is to write. Set a daily quota to reach, and consistently hit it. If you need a jump-start to get going, do something like NaNoWriMo.

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This month...I have actually written!  I know, shocking, isn't it?  I started doing Inkygirl's 1,000 word a day challenge on May 27 because I was tired of not writing anything at all.  Judging from my experiences with NaNoWriMo, I should have guessed that it would go very, very well.  I mean, I'm not hitting every day, but 27/35 days is pretty good, especially considering I had travel and work lost when my computer unexpectedly restarted in there.

I find that the more experience I have writing, the more I tend to rewrite, especially when I'm working on longer things.  "Saucy Reboot" is currently on schedule to use 3,743 words out of the 17,893 I've written because I keep rewriting it to deal with plot and characterization issues.  I still don't have much of a plot on this one.

Fics I have worked on:

• Everything, at least a little.  Sometimes I can't decide what to work on.
• Greatest Glory, almost pure Buffy, Saucy, 11,908 words (complete).  This is technically the prologue/prequel to all of the Saucyverse fics.  After Marcie Ross unexpectedly appeared in it, it grew to 12k words and I actually finished it.  I think this is the first time I've had dialogue that's really worked and felt easy to write.  Now I need to rewrite, and find a beta reader.  Which, by the way, I have no idea how to do.
• "Saucy Reboot", Buffy, Saucy, 3743/17893 words (WIP).  Lots and lots of rewriting with this one, still no real plot even if the premise is strong and I have a few ideas for what I want to happen and my very first subplot.
• Miscellaneous Saucy side-fics, Saucy, (WIP).  This verse keeps surprising me, and the more I write in it the more I want to write about Saucy itself, even though it's very peripheral to the main stories.  It's very odd.
• Vocation, Mulan, Dinosaur, 249 words (complete).  A oneshot leading into Mulan's role in the Dinosaur'verse.  Meaning, of course, that it's before her First Death, so it's only part of the verse because I say it is.  Once it's been a few days I'll see if it needs editing.  Of course, I'm not putting any of this 'verse up anywhere other than my Blogger until I have more of the main stories in it, which is kind of aggravating me.
• Becoming Eliot Spencer, Buffy/Leverage, [untitled verse], 581 words (complete).  Xander becomes Eliot Spencer.  There will (hopefully) be another fic in this verse, of when Leverage canon starts.  And maybe a third, when his past comes to the fore, but that's more doubtful.  I have no idea where this came from.

So...success!  How's your writing going?

I'm so excited.

My ultimate goal with regards to Latin is to become fluent, or at least as fluent as I can become (speaking realistically, there are probably limits to this due to lack of native speakers, the fact that I don't really know anybody who's into Latin, and the relative scarcity of books in Latin).  Periodically I check my progress towards this goal by randomly going to the Latin Wikipedia and seeing how much of it I understand (and can pick up through context clues).  Apparently two semesters is the magic amount of Latin I need for it to not be completely frustrating to attempt to read Wikipedia.

I have Latin and school on the brain, so here, have some of my ideas for my hypothetical geek school:
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Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

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I've noticed a pattern in the characters I like (with a few outliers): I like characters who are smart, sarcastic, and keep others at a distance.  I like characters who don't have all three characteristics; a few I like don't have any of them (or at least they don't in my headspace).  But those are the main three characteristics that make me like characters.

But the thing is, the characters I like are written out of character a lot.  I assume the writers see their behavior as a flaw to be fixed, because at least some of the time everything else about the fic's good.  I can buy a "becoming more warm and fuzzy" plot, but only if it's part of an epic, or because of some trauma.  If the story's not very long, and the character starts out acting nicer than they do in canon, I don't like it.  If I wanted to read characters like that, I'd be searching for fic with different characters.  I like House and McKay and Snape because they're not nice, and they hold all but a few at a distance, not because I want to see them cozy up to Random Character A without being forced into it.

And on a related note, I don't want to see everybody spilling their secrets.  Sure, for some characters it's in character to tell, but there aren't a lot of them.  I'll never buy the Stargate characters (except for the aliens, and even then it depends) telling people without being told to tell them by the higher-ups.  I won't buy Methos telling somebody he's known for five minutes that he's Methos and what that means.  I won't buy anybody doing one of those "this is everything that's ever happened to me" introductions, unless I get the feeling that the character thinks it's necessary (which would be...one-upmanship?  I can't think of any other reason).

Basically, the characters have established patterns of behavior, and we like or hate them because of that behavior.  If you're writing about a character, stick to their usual pattern of behavior or one that can be extrapolated from their usual pattern of behavior.  If you don't like the characters as they are, and absolutely must change them, at least include a warning that they're OOC.

Lately I've been thinking about recs.  I don't actually read a lot of actual lists of recs (mostly because the way people describe recs to convince people to read them is completely useless to me), but Delicious, where I find a large chunk of the fic I read, functions in much the same way.  There are a few people who tag everything they read, but for the most part people only tag fic that they enjoy for whatever reason.  And since you can see the number of people who have tagged a particular URL, it works pretty well if you want to see what a lot of people like- an aggregated rec list, if you will.

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"Write what you know" is the most basic advice given to amateur writers for a reason.  When you write what you know, you have to do less research and are less likely to get things wrong, not to mention that it's far easier for those who are just getting their toes wet writing.  It's easier to come up with a plot when you're working with what you deal with in your everyday life because you know what's possible, and what's interesting to other people who are interested in the same things you are.

Writers writing what they know can lead to greater depth and quality.  For instance, when I read about people who are disabled, it's easy to see which writers know about being disabled from personal experience, and which ones merely think it makes a good plot point.  I can tell which writers have been/are in the military, when they're writing about the military.  It's not just trivia that makes the writers who know what they're talking about on an intimate level stand out.  You can throw trivia at me all day, and I'll know the difference between that and somebody who has experience, even if I myself have no experience with what you're writing about.  If you're an insurance adjuster writing about an insurance adjuster who has whacky adventures, you're going to have a more accurate perspective on that than somebody who googled it.  This doesn't mean you can't stretch yourself- if you were in a major earthquake in California, you can likely write convincingly about a major earthquake in the fictional world you've created.

When you write about subjects that you don't know, you run the risk of getting them wrong.  We've all watched movies that lay in our area of interest and got everything completely wrong- you think Hackers was anything near accurate in regards to computers or hacking?  When you write about subjects you do know, you get them right unless you deliberately decide to get them wrong.